Name: Japan's Biggest Gaming Obsession Explained | Pachinko
Uploaded: 2020-07-30T09:33:12.000Z
Duration: 11 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

An estimated 1 in 10 people in Japan play.

In a market valued at 200 billion dollars a year.

Adverbs of degree

There's scarcely a street across the country that doesn't have it, and you'll often hear it before you see it.

Loud, confusing, and a national obsession,  This is pachinko.

If you've never set foot in Japan, there's a good chance you'll have never heard of pachinko.

I had no idea what it was until my first day in Japan, when I accidentally stumbled into a pachinko parlor,

in central Tokyo, and was subsequently deafened by the noise of hundreds of shrieking machines, and

thousands of ball bearings being blasted, in every direction.

I think the best way to describe pachinko is: It's part arcade game,

It's part gambling, and it's part... noise.

It's just *agh* to so unbelievably noisy.

But why is pachinko popular? And how do you play it?

I don't really have the answers to these questions I'm awful at it.

Uh, so today I've enlisted the help of a good friend who is a retired veteran of pachinko.

And he's going to share with us the secrets to success.

Pachinko has its roots in Chicago, in the early 20th century.

When gaming manufacturers started selling the Corinth game.

A children's version of Bagatelle pinball.

in the 1920s the game made it to Asia,  becoming a hit in Japan.

Where it became a staple of Japanese sweet shops, as a means of getting children to stick around,

And it soon got the nickname of "Pachi Pachi",

an onomatopoeia referring to the noisy,  popping and snapping sounds of the game.

In the 1930s the game found a more mature audience,

When the board was turned upright and made larger.

However World War II began, and most of the machines were scrapped for metal.

For a time the game disappeared, and didn't reemerge until the late 1940s.

But it wasn't until after World War II,  that pachinko became really popular,

with a surplus of metal ball bearings and factories across the country.

and an entertainment sector, desperate to be filled.

Typically most pachinko parlors, each ball represents four yen.

with players depositing 500 yen into the machine, in return for 125 balls.

For the first 30 years for pachinko is very mechanical, it all depended on the amount of force you put on the lever.

This will dictate the direction of force, put on the ball bearing.

And using the lever you launch them, around the pachinko machine with the aim of getting them into a pocket,

In the simplest games, this would lead to a jackpot.

And a flood of ball bearings which flow down, Into your container at the bottom.

and at the end of the game you redeem the ball some prizes.

the more ball bearings you have, the bigger the prize.

and then in the 1980s, pachinko machines became electronic gaming devices.

And things got a lot more colorful, a lot more noisy,

Pachinko is since morphed into a  slightly more complex game,

the aim of landing balls into the start chucker remains.

However doing so opens up more holes to aim for, to increase your jackpot,

and triggering some rather crazy-looking minigames, which are more reminiscent of arcade machine.

But, there's more to pachinko than just a flood of ball bearings, and a dizzying array of colors.

It is by far Japan's biggest gambling market.

Gambling in Japan is technically banned, however pachinko parlors have found a way around it.

At the end of a game you receive a coupon or ticket depending on the size of your winnings,

You can then leave the pachinko parlor, and head around the back of the building, or down a nearby street.

To a neighbor counter, Where you're able to redeem the ticket, for a cash reward.

And because it's on a separate building, the gambling laws, they're easily circumnavigated.

I remember the first time I heard about this loophole on how comical ridiculous it sounded,

but, when you're talking about a market worth 200 billion dollars, or four percent of Japan's GDP.

Well, it's a lot of government tax revenue isn't it?

Pachinko parlors are typically difficult to film in, with the sort of strict policies you'd find, in a casino.

But, we've been given access to film inside, a pachinko cafe in Takayama, in Gifu.

With a colorful noisy machines, stand in contrast to the town's traditional, Edo era streets.

The Ebis Cafe is part of a growing movement, to throw off the image of pachinko being a gamble or sport.

Here you can't redeem your winnings for money, but you can turn them into prizes.

They're keen to get the message out that pachinko isn't about money.

It is genuinely a fun, exciting, fast-paced game.

than by finding out if Natsuki, The Pachinko Veteran. lives up to his reputation, of being a pro.

We're not gambling here today because gambling is wrong (mainly because I always lose).

What we are doing, is giving Natsuki 1,500 pachinko balls.

And we gonna see how many balls you can turn this into.

If you can get 6,000 pachinko balls, in thirty minutes we can win the prize:

- Natsuki: Of course. - Chris: Absolutely.

Natsuki (off camera): Ah Sake! Sake! I want a sake!